The 10 Best Cities for Public Transportation?

How the press misrepresented a recent report from the Brookings Institution—and why most city rankings are problematic in general

There were a lot of stories in the press last week about a voluminous study by the Metropolitan Policy Center at Brookings
(which does great work and a lot of it) on the best and worst places in
the U.S. for public transit. That's the way the headlines read, anyway:
"The 10 Best (and 10 Worst) Cities For Public Transportation,"
proclaimed the top of the story by my fellow writer on The Atlantic's website Derek Thompson.

Imagine
the surprise when people noticed that automobile-dependent Fresno and
Modesto ranked higher than New York and Chicago—you know, cities where
people actually do find transit comparatively convenient and efficient.

The problem is that "best and worst for transit" isn't what the
Brookings study actually measured. Rather, the study looked at the
number of residents living within three-quarters of a mile of a transit stop (studies show
that people generally won't walk more than a quarter mile to the bus), and the
number of jobs within a 90-minute transit ride from those stops (a
generous amount of time, given that few people are willing to spend 90
minutes each way commuting unless they have absolutely no other choice).
Brookings was not really measuring whether transit service was good
(the study didn't look at frequency of service, either), but whether it
was even possible to take or not—the point being that, in some places,
it's impossible, even if you're willing to walk farther than research
says people will walk and take more time than research says people will
willingly take.

Brookings deserves credit for suggesting that we
should at least figure out a way to make transit commuting remotely
possible, especially for working families who cannot afford to drive.
Look at the useful points made in the study's summary on the Brookings website.
I might argue that, in this context, the rankings of "best" cities mean
little; but the rankings of the "worst" do, because they identify the
places where public transportation is inaccessible no matter how
desperately one needs or wants to use it.

Here's a comparison of
the actual top 10 cities for transit, as indicated by the shares of
workers who use transit regularly, to the top 10 for at least possible
transit coverage as found by Brookings:

Note that, in the
Brookings list, #10 Modesto has only a 0.8 percent transit mode share,
meaning that 99.2 percent of Modesto commuters get to work some other
way. Of the 100 cities researched in the study, Modesto ranks #83 for
actual transit usage, meaning that, whatever is theoretically possible,
the people in Modesto think the service is pretty lousy.

This
illustrates what I really dislike about "rankings" in research: Especially when reported in the media, they completely miss the nuances
or, as in this case, even the main point that the public is likely to
take. But advocacy organizations (I should caution that Brookings is not
really an advocacy organization) do rankings all the time, even
contriving ways to turn data into rankings, simply because they get
press coverage. The media eat this stuff up.

I'm guilty, too. Look back through my blog archives
and you'll find me reporting lots of best and worst rankings from
various sources, because it's sort of fun, and gives me a handle for
writing about concepts that are important. I even got into
Brookings-like trouble a couple of weeks ago, when I reported
on cities found by the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center to
have high scores for implementing "walk-friendly" policies. I cautioned
in the post that there was a difference between implementing policy and
actually being highly walkable, and that only cities that applied for a
rating were scored by the Institute. Of course, readers completely
glossed over the disclaimers, and so did one of my editors, headlining
my story, "Pedestrian Perfection: The 11 Most Walk-Friendly U.S. Cities." Upon reflection, that was completely understandable, and maybe I deserved the grief I took for it.

In the case of the Brookings story, things only got worse when one of the study's authors tried to explain
why all of the top-ranking cities in the study were in the West,
apparently grasping to argue that cities in the American West not only
are inherently better for smart growth because of their geography but
also because they have better smart-growth policies. I'm guessing that
site visits must not have been made by the researchers to Phoenix, Las
Vegas, or even Modesto. The one western city that nearly everyone in
urbanist circles would agree has superior smart-growth policies,
Portland, did not make the top list. I will give them this: Honolulu can
hold its head high, being the only city to make both the theoretical
top 10 and the actual top 10.

For some thoughtful commentary on what the Brookings study does and does not mean, see Nate Silver's article on the New York Times site, and Richard Layman's on Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space.

This post also appears on NRDC's Switchboard.Images: RJ Schmidt/flickr

Kaid Benfield is the director of the Sustainable Communities and Smart Growth program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, co-founder of the LEED for Neighborhood Development rating system, and co-founder of Smart Growth America.
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Kaid Benfield is the director of the Sustainable Communities
and Smart Growth program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, co-founder
of the LEED for Neighborhood Development rating system, and co-founder of Smart
Growth America. He is the author or co-author of Once There
Were Greenfields (NRDC 1999), Solving
Sprawl (Island Press 2001), Smart Growth
In a Changing World (APA Planners Press 2007), and Green Community (APA Planners Press 2009). In 2009,
Kaid was voted one of the "top urban thinkers" on Planetizen.com, and
he was named one of "the most influential people in sustainable planning
and development" in 2010 by the Partnership for Sustainable Communities.
He blogs at NRDC's Switchboard.